How does anyone seriously trust LastPass anymore? Years ago, I was working for a company handling bank data. They were using LP immediately following a previous LP security incident and had no plans to migrate away.
I’ve done a lot of security consulting work for hundreds of companies and one thing I noticed is that the companies that actually took security seriously were the ones that had been breached in the past. Until the execs and board see the dollar impact themself and not just read about it, the security program never gets the funds it needs.
I’m not saying I recommend LastPass for that reason, but I wouldn’t write them off for that reason.
A lot of people and orgs don't use security products for security. They use them for security theater. A vast majority of people, even many security people, will never hear about this breach. So LastPass still works great for them.
If you want to be a security vendor reseller, just make sure to sell to orgs that have a compliance requirement, either by law or similar.
Do you sell firewalls? sell them to banks or something. Anti-malware endpoints? Insurances too. SIEMs? payment gateways for their PCI DSS environments.
Price it just below what would be the fine for not complying, that way you maximize the invoice.
I stopped playing the security vendor reseller game because it got too boring this way to make money.
And it will continue until we can sue company being breached for criminal negligence. Should a single company executive be personally liable in these situations, the scale of the problem would be orders of magnitude less severe because they would spend the appropriate amount of effort to cover their damn ass.
This is it. These companies don't really care about their customer's data. Their SDLC is no more rigorous than any other SaaS product. They have junior people and (now) AI pushing code with a quick "LGTM" PR check just like everyone else.
The way to stop this is to have actual consequences for the decision makers here. You can build high-integrity software and some fields (avionics) have done it. But the organization needs to be built from the ground up to do it and nobody's going to do it if you can just get breached and offer a phony apology over and over again.
Moving to another solution involves some expense and operational risk (changing procedures, increased human error rates, locking yourself out). Even though the risk of staying with the existing solution goes from "unlikely" to "possible" (so maybe from yellow/amber to red), a lot of companies rationalize it as "but now the provider will be extra careful so the likelihood is actually lower".
Crowdstrike had a famous incident and is still probably #2 in the cybersecurity world. Sometimes assessing risk is a funny business.
True, but how come such risks are addressable when adding AI or opening up to yet another API or when some savings are promised with a new product/product feature?
Having your own auth workflow was instant fail with the well architected framework committee. Using Okta was instant pass.
I don't necessarily disagree with that policy but given that Okta was breached several times while I was working there, it was interesting the extent to which our CSO had blinders about it.
As someone that is not really in the game, does Okta have such a bad track record, and are there alternatives that are considered solid? From the outside, it seemed like EntraID is a bit of a burning dumpster fire, while Okta seemed expensive, but usable and decent (from comments I read)
What's the risk, and does that change by moving to an alternative?
Companies deal with leaked secrets a lot. A company already using a password manager is ahead of the game.
Suppose they move to a competitor. That's a migration and training that someone has to drive. What do they gain? Another company that can also have exploits? Or they self-host, and now have to fund that, and still potentially get exploits?
Ultimately, this likely isn't that big of a deal for a company.
And they have to weigh it up against all the other things that they can be doing.
I'm sure this is worse than using lastpass in some way
but for the past couple years I've just generated and forgotten 90% of my passwords. the final 10% I keep in a password manager. But if the service isn't really that important I just use the 'forgot my password' to change and generate a new password every time I need to login
This works if the account doesn't have 2FA. On my last side project app users can login only via email OTP. There are security downsides with that, someone can send phishing link and use OTP submitted to the fake site, but the app doesn't store anything sensitive (it's a game which tracks your progress) so I guess it's not a major security risk.
Lots more companies affected. Some more listed below:
>"Klue has not said how many of its hundreds of customers are affected. Several companies have come forward to confirm they had data stolen during the attack, including Gong, Jamf, HackerOne, Insurity, OneTrust, Recorded Future, Snyk, Sprout Social, and Tanium."
>Cybercrime group Icarus took credit for the breach, saying on its leak site that it will publish the stolen data on Monday if the company does not pay the hackers’ ransom."
This isn't great but it's not that big of a deal either. A lot of companies got bit by the Klue breach but it's not like your vaults are being accessed.
> The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
For folks new to the KeePass ecosystem, it’s KeePassXC[0] now. The original KeePass is still developed as well, however KeePassXC is a cross-platform updated version.
Using a password manager has 2 main tradeoffs and mistakes:
1- Tradeoff individual account risk, for systemic risk. You may argue password managers are safe, but few would argue that the risk model reduces the risk of individual password leaks more than the risk of all your passwords leaking. It's a tradeoff.
2- Cat and mouse security: There's a class of security decisions that work because they are new and different. First the weakness was that passwords were short, then you make passwords long but unmemorable, so people rely on some other mechanisms to authenticate, like a file on their computer, a drive, a fingerprint, facial recog, which may in turn be protected by a second factor password.
At first the new security model will not be stressed, but as more users migrate from one security model to the next one, that's when you are able to compare the security of both technologies, it starts being a juicy enough target that it becomes attacked.
So we are at the point where password managers are used enough that they start becoming worthwhile targets of attack (to overcome the difficulty of vulnerating them).
Also worth noting that these attacks are more winner-takes-all. In the sense that rather than seeing one account hacked every couple of hours, you will see them all hacked at once, because you introduced a vendor in the password supply chain AND because the vendor centralizes all of the passwords. So target that one vendor and from a single attack you get all the spoils. So when comparing the security of the olden method and the new, just 1 incident is enough to undo all of the reputational gains it has made over the years.
"Password manager" used to mean a program that runs locally on your computer. At some point people started making it into a SaaS, because that's more profitable.
I do think there are some cases where an online password manager makes sense, e.g. for businesses, but for individuals it's better to just stick with an offline password manager, at least for the high value accounts.
You can and should have the best of both worlds. Using Enpass, the program _is_ local, it just backs up the entire database (encrypted SQLite3) to a cloud.
But if even that is too much then f.ex. `keepass` + a scheduled script to periodically backup to your own servers is also perfectly viable.
Password managers (whether it's Lastpass or your browser's built-in password store) also protect against phishing since they tie passwords to domain names.
I don't think password managers which store encrypted vaults are less safe than trying to have and juggle strong unique-per-domain passwords, even if you think that the password manager is becoming a target.
When they work… I finally gave up on 1Password as it has been getting worse and worse about actually autofilling for a few years. After all the Avengers turned into investors and the price increase was announced, I jumped ship. It felt like they were more worried about their ROI than the product. After 18 years of use, this was pretty disappointing.
> The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
It's not just about long vs. short passwords. IMO the greatest benefit of having a password manager -- whether it's a bloated Electron app or just a text file on your computer -- is that it enables you to juggle hundreds of different passwords, randomly generated for each site. It's the best way we know of to limit the blast radius when (not if!) some of those sites inevitably get hacked.
>“On June 12th, LastPass was made aware of an incident that occurred at Klue (klue.com), a third-party market intelligence platform utilized by our go-to-market teams, which integrates with our Salesforce and Gong systems,”
The specific dependency that gets companies infected, and the optics that result, are so important. There have been sillier examples, but you can see how in this case, the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their main and only product.
So this couldn't have happened to bitwarden, you own the reputation loss if any of your suppliers get owned. Though it really doesn't matter anymore for LastPass they leaked their customers vaults before, I have no idea how they can still be in business.
> the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their […] product
To be fair, and I don’t want to, supposedly the only thing that was compromised was contact info. No vaults were exfiltrated or unlocked (as far as the article info goes).
So this is really just another very boring info breach, not a targeted password-stealing hack.
the Achilles heel of a "secrets vault" is it becomes a defacto priority target. I still dont see how any reasonable person was convinced a cloud service was the best place to put all their secrets.
The problem is not the secrets vault. It's the casual acceptance of giving peoples data to third party processors. What value do last pass customers get from having their details passed on to a marketing firm? None. For all the talk of privacy and putting customers first they are acting like any other company in any other field.
How does anyone seriously trust LastPass anymore? Years ago, I was working for a company handling bank data. They were using LP immediately following a previous LP security incident and had no plans to migrate away.
I’ve done a lot of security consulting work for hundreds of companies and one thing I noticed is that the companies that actually took security seriously were the ones that had been breached in the past. Until the execs and board see the dollar impact themself and not just read about it, the security program never gets the funds it needs.
I’m not saying I recommend LastPass for that reason, but I wouldn’t write them off for that reason.
A lot of people and orgs don't use security products for security. They use them for security theater. A vast majority of people, even many security people, will never hear about this breach. So LastPass still works great for them.
This.
If you want to be a security vendor reseller, just make sure to sell to orgs that have a compliance requirement, either by law or similar.
Do you sell firewalls? sell them to banks or something. Anti-malware endpoints? Insurances too. SIEMs? payment gateways for their PCI DSS environments.
Price it just below what would be the fine for not complying, that way you maximize the invoice.
I stopped playing the security vendor reseller game because it got too boring this way to make money.
And it will continue until we can sue company being breached for criminal negligence. Should a single company executive be personally liable in these situations, the scale of the problem would be orders of magnitude less severe because they would spend the appropriate amount of effort to cover their damn ass.
This is it. These companies don't really care about their customer's data. Their SDLC is no more rigorous than any other SaaS product. They have junior people and (now) AI pushing code with a quick "LGTM" PR check just like everyone else.
The way to stop this is to have actual consequences for the decision makers here. You can build high-integrity software and some fields (avionics) have done it. But the organization needs to be built from the ground up to do it and nobody's going to do it if you can just get breached and offer a phony apology over and over again.
“Here’s a year of credit monitoring. Be grateful.”
Moving to another solution involves some expense and operational risk (changing procedures, increased human error rates, locking yourself out). Even though the risk of staying with the existing solution goes from "unlikely" to "possible" (so maybe from yellow/amber to red), a lot of companies rationalize it as "but now the provider will be extra careful so the likelihood is actually lower".
Crowdstrike had a famous incident and is still probably #2 in the cybersecurity world. Sometimes assessing risk is a funny business.
True, but how come such risks are addressable when adding AI or opening up to yet another API or when some savings are promised with a new product/product feature?
The one that amazes me is Okta.
OK their Mac UX is great, but given their rate of incidents how can you trust it?
Clearly this stuff is not actually bought based on track record.
Funny I used to work in an org with Okta.
Having your own auth workflow was instant fail with the well architected framework committee. Using Okta was instant pass.
I don't necessarily disagree with that policy but given that Okta was breached several times while I was working there, it was interesting the extent to which our CSO had blinders about it.
As someone that is not really in the game, does Okta have such a bad track record, and are there alternatives that are considered solid? From the outside, it seemed like EntraID is a bit of a burning dumpster fire, while Okta seemed expensive, but usable and decent (from comments I read)
What's the risk, and does that change by moving to an alternative?
Companies deal with leaked secrets a lot. A company already using a password manager is ahead of the game.
Suppose they move to a competitor. That's a migration and training that someone has to drive. What do they gain? Another company that can also have exploits? Or they self-host, and now have to fund that, and still potentially get exploits?
Ultimately, this likely isn't that big of a deal for a company.
And they have to weigh it up against all the other things that they can be doing.
Compare https://hn.algolia.com/?q=lastpass to basically any other password manager, like https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1password or https://hn.algolia.com/?q=bitwarden
Those companies do not have the same number and severity of exploits. lastpass is truly in a category of its own
> They were using LP immediately following a previous LP security incident
“Yeah, but they fixed that!”
Normies don’t pull the historical list of breaches and vulns.
They just read headlines.
I'm sure this is worse than using lastpass in some way
but for the past couple years I've just generated and forgotten 90% of my passwords. the final 10% I keep in a password manager. But if the service isn't really that important I just use the 'forgot my password' to change and generate a new password every time I need to login
I got caught out as I had no longer access to the old phone number that was now used to send 2FA text.
This works if the account doesn't have 2FA. On my last side project app users can login only via email OTP. There are security downsides with that, someone can send phishing link and use OTP submitted to the fake site, but the app doesn't store anything sensitive (it's a game which tracks your progress) so I guess it's not a major security risk.
Lots more companies affected. Some more listed below:
>"Klue has not said how many of its hundreds of customers are affected. Several companies have come forward to confirm they had data stolen during the attack, including Gong, Jamf, HackerOne, Insurity, OneTrust, Recorded Future, Snyk, Sprout Social, and Tanium."
>Cybercrime group Icarus took credit for the breach, saying on its leak site that it will publish the stolen data on Monday if the company does not pay the hackers’ ransom."
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/22/klue-hack-results-in-data-...
This isn't great but it's not that big of a deal either. A lot of companies got bit by the Klue breach but it's not like your vaults are being accessed.
https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/klue-supply-chain-incident-a...
> The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
I switched to keepass a decade ago (maybe) and never looked back
Sitting here with my KeepassX and being happy, again.
For folks new to the KeePass ecosystem, it’s KeePassXC[0] now. The original KeePass is still developed as well, however KeePassXC is a cross-platform updated version.
[0] https://keepassxc.org/
How good is their mobile and sync story?
Source: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/klue-supply-chain-incident-a...
>an incident that occurred at Klue (klue.com), a third-party market intelligence platform
Well, I hope Klue got them more customers than they are losing due to this.
They still have no klue.
Using a password manager has 2 main tradeoffs and mistakes:
1- Tradeoff individual account risk, for systemic risk. You may argue password managers are safe, but few would argue that the risk model reduces the risk of individual password leaks more than the risk of all your passwords leaking. It's a tradeoff.
2- Cat and mouse security: There's a class of security decisions that work because they are new and different. First the weakness was that passwords were short, then you make passwords long but unmemorable, so people rely on some other mechanisms to authenticate, like a file on their computer, a drive, a fingerprint, facial recog, which may in turn be protected by a second factor password.
At first the new security model will not be stressed, but as more users migrate from one security model to the next one, that's when you are able to compare the security of both technologies, it starts being a juicy enough target that it becomes attacked.
So we are at the point where password managers are used enough that they start becoming worthwhile targets of attack (to overcome the difficulty of vulnerating them).
Also worth noting that these attacks are more winner-takes-all. In the sense that rather than seeing one account hacked every couple of hours, you will see them all hacked at once, because you introduced a vendor in the password supply chain AND because the vendor centralizes all of the passwords. So target that one vendor and from a single attack you get all the spoils. So when comparing the security of the olden method and the new, just 1 incident is enough to undo all of the reputational gains it has made over the years.
"Password manager" used to mean a program that runs locally on your computer. At some point people started making it into a SaaS, because that's more profitable.
I do think there are some cases where an online password manager makes sense, e.g. for businesses, but for individuals it's better to just stick with an offline password manager, at least for the high value accounts.
You can and should have the best of both worlds. Using Enpass, the program _is_ local, it just backs up the entire database (encrypted SQLite3) to a cloud.
But if even that is too much then f.ex. `keepass` + a scheduled script to periodically backup to your own servers is also perfectly viable.
It became SaaS because its more practical when you have many devices or many users.
Password managers (whether it's Lastpass or your browser's built-in password store) also protect against phishing since they tie passwords to domain names.
I don't think password managers which store encrypted vaults are less safe than trying to have and juggle strong unique-per-domain passwords, even if you think that the password manager is becoming a target.
When they work… I finally gave up on 1Password as it has been getting worse and worse about actually autofilling for a few years. After all the Avengers turned into investors and the price increase was announced, I jumped ship. It felt like they were more worried about their ROI than the product. After 18 years of use, this was pretty disappointing.
The article is about a marketing data breach, not passwords.
From a marketing perspective, a data breach of any kind looks horrible for a company whose entire job is keeping secrets safe.
> The information accessed was limited to standard business contact information and related customer relationship management (CRM) data, including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as support case data and sales-related data.
It's not just about long vs. short passwords. IMO the greatest benefit of having a password manager -- whether it's a bloated Electron app or just a text file on your computer -- is that it enables you to juggle hundreds of different passwords, randomly generated for each site. It's the best way we know of to limit the blast radius when (not if!) some of those sites inevitably get hacked.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657784
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48647272
Third time's the charm
>“On June 12th, LastPass was made aware of an incident that occurred at Klue (klue.com), a third-party market intelligence platform utilized by our go-to-market teams, which integrates with our Salesforce and Gong systems,”
The specific dependency that gets companies infected, and the optics that result, are so important. There have been sillier examples, but you can see how in this case, the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their main and only product.
“ the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their main and only product”
What do you mean exactly here What do you think LastPass could have done to prevent this specific issue?
Not supply the information to any other company.
Did they need to give them all of this?
customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, support case data, sales-related data.
Bitwarden doesn't redirect you to a third party if you visit their support page:
https://bitwarden.com/help/
But LastPass does (Salesforce CNAME):
https://support.lastpass.com/s/?language=en_US
So this couldn't have happened to bitwarden, you own the reputation loss if any of your suppliers get owned. Though it really doesn't matter anymore for LastPass they leaked their customers vaults before, I have no idea how they can still be in business.
> the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their […] product
To be fair, and I don’t want to, supposedly the only thing that was compromised was contact info. No vaults were exfiltrated or unlocked (as far as the article info goes).
So this is really just another very boring info breach, not a targeted password-stealing hack.
The other breaches they suffered were worse.
So... you business plan is to secure peoples personal data by handing some of that data to a third party. Got it.
the Achilles heel of a "secrets vault" is it becomes a defacto priority target. I still dont see how any reasonable person was convinced a cloud service was the best place to put all their secrets.
The problem is not the secrets vault. It's the casual acceptance of giving peoples data to third party processors. What value do last pass customers get from having their details passed on to a marketing firm? None. For all the talk of privacy and putting customers first they are acting like any other company in any other field.
Gmail is at least as large a target, and they don’t keep having breaches.